The Official Venmo Blog

January 31, 2013 · by Venmo

An Easier Way to Pay on Your Mobile Device

At Venmo, we have focused for the past three years on building a product that transforms the awkward chore of paying a friend into an experience our users have described as the “Greatest thing to happen to currency since…Currency” and “One of those life-changing apps.” Very early on, as we grew to love the convenience of using Venmo to pay friends, family, babysitters, piano teachers, and others, we realized we wanted Venmo to be more—we wanted it to be the best way to pay for *anything* on a phone. To make that vision a reality, six months ago we teamed up with Braintree, the payment infrastructure behind the most popular mobile apps—Uber, Airbnb, HotelTonight, Fab, LevelUp, LivingSocial, TaskRabbit, Wrapp, etc—and today, together, we are announcing a new product that embodies our shared vision: Venmo Touch.

Many apps in the Braintree network already have an awesome payment experience—Uber, for example, makes taking a ride so magically easy that it doesn’t even feel like you have to pay. So, the real remaining pain point we want to address with Venmo Touch is not the actual purchase, but having to type a credit card number in every time you use a new app, on a tiny touch screen, without a full size keyboard or auto-fill browser plugins that can make this easier on a desktop.

Venmo Touch eliminates the need to constantly re-type your card number by providing a connective layer across all the apps on your phone, designed to make every payment in a new app as easy as buying a song in iTunes. The next time you enter your card details in one of the apps in our network, just tick the “Save card with Venmo” checkbox (you don’t even have to have the Venmo app installed for this to work). Then, when you use other apps on the same device, you will see the option to use the saved card to pay with just a single touch. To protect against unauthorized purchases, you simply enter your credit card security code when using your card in a new app.

Venmo Touch is currently in private beta on iOS with several merchants (which also happen to be some of our favorite apps) in the Braintree network going live in the coming weeks, including HotelTonight, TaskRabbit, Wrapp, and several others. We look forward to you trying Venmo Touch as more merchants go live. Let us know what you think by telling us here.

p.s. developers, if you would like to include Venmo Touch in your app, contact us at venmotouch@braintreepayments.com